Drinks Time played old American movies on a large-screen TV, and the place was filled with runners spending the night in a stupefied nostalgia, drunk on ouzo and Amstel, our feet sticking to the grimy floor.

Candy and Stephan were talking about the fight; Stephan was bruised and swollen and sick-looking. Candy said Tom was to blame and got what he deserved. And most people said “If it wasn’t for Declan” or “Thank god for Declan.” Then someone began singing the IRA song Come out you black and tans come out and fight me like a man as if runners had experienced eight hundred years of oppression by Greek cab drivers, as if Stephan was Bobby Sands.

“Do you want another drink?” Candy asked.

The drinking was not good for forgetting or remembering. The bar was too loud, the movie impossible to watch and the only voices I wanted to hear were Jasper’s and Milo’s, wanted to go back to the room and find them there.

* * *

I remembered waking up from the sound of traffic and the sudden shock of sobriety and letting myself into the room through the balcony doors. Milo was sleeping in his boxers, hands locked over the pillow on his head. His long, flat feet hung off the edge of the mattress, which was ringed with their possessions. Bottles, cigarettes, clothes, books and comic books, scraps of paper, pens.

Jasper lay unconscious beside him. Tender looking, his pale skin shone in the gray light like a body floating just below the surface of water. I remember being very awake that night and sitting on the cold tile with my back pressed against the wall, smoking his cigarettes and trying to read one of his books by the light of the burning ash. They turned in their sleep, held one another. Jasper breathed heavily and I held the cigarette close to his face so I could see him better in the red glow. Smelled his hair, put my cheek against his.

We’d drifted south from the same lost places to find this life. Bright overcast haze, darkness and clouds, traffic and silence, the smell of diesel and baking bread. And all around the low white postwar architecture and empty plazas and crowded ruins, the temples built by slaves, like an internal landscape at last made visible.

Jasper could sleep but Milo would eventually wake. “Com’ed, why are you up? Come to bed, little Bride.”

I would curl beside him, my back to his chest, his hands along my skin, and we’d doze, the three of us, a tangle of limbs.

Now I had nothing, no letter, no message, not one book left behind.

“I think it was genetic,” Candy said, looking down at the condensation on her glass. The sound of the bar suddenly loud all around and I must have asked her a question.

“He probably had some predisposition to dying young, weak liver.”

“Who?”

“Who do you bloody think? Last I talked to him, he was headed to Drinks Time from that shite flea market past Monastiraki; had some things to sell, he said. Because he was going back to school in the Alba Cathedral to study nonexistent objects. What? That’s what he said. Got quite angry when I laughed. Next time I came round Drinks Time, day or so later, he was gone. That week it got hot. They said his parents came.”

“Why does everyone keep saying when it got hot? It’s always hot.”

“Not like this,” Candy said. “Your shoes melted to the sidewalk. Bunch a people died that week from the heat. You musta read ’bout it, nah? D’you stop reading the news after Murat?”

I said, “Where’s Milo?”

“Who?”

I looked at her incredulously. “Milo.”

“Right, your boyfriend’s boyfriend. I got no clue, love. Left after a run; didn’t meet us back here, either, did he?”

On the television there was a montage of aerial views: cliffs, oceans, forests, highways, buildings, factories. I drank the last of my pint, closed my eyes and the images kept flashing: white deer, men walking through the trees out into a bloom of asphodels. A river creaking as it froze. And tangled in the weeds on the low muddy bank, a tiny paper house on fire.